From Montreal band Little Scream, have a listen to The Heron and the Fox, a gentle tune sung with smoky voiced longing.
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Nice post on using the Cynefin framework to design an ideas generation workshop:
At a workshop I facilitated last week – the challenge was helping a team to generate new ideas for innovating their business – I used Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework to great effect. This was a smart crowd, who were willing to go along with our approach on helping them see new directions through a process of emergent discovery – but they wanted to understand why we were following this approach. For the many cerebral folks in this crowd, I explained the Cynefin framework – and they got it! We could have studied ‘best practices for establishing an innovation culture’, or we could have thoroughly analysed successful innovations of the past for ‘good practices’ and for discovering cause-effect relationships between new ideas and successful outcomes. But we didn’t. And they were ok with it once I explained to them why innovation and ‘best practices’ or ‘analytics’ don’t go well together, using the Cynefin framework. In short, I argued that innovation – the activity they wanted to engage in – has many characteristics of a complex adaptive system: cause and effect are not linked in a linear way, many agents are interconnected and interacting, etc.
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News from Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea about upcoming PeerSpirit Circle trainings, including a new advanced course. This may be some of the finest learning you will ever do with respect to learning about and working with groups:
The PeerSpirit Circle Practicum gathers small groups of people at retreat centers for four-and-a-half days of intensive, experiential learning that blends council time with significant skill development.
via PeerSpirit : Circle Training, Circle Process, Circle Practicum.
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Responding to an inquiry about the copyright of materials on my site, I wrote back:
Everything original on my website is for free, non-commerical use with attribution. Of course there are things I link to that have different copyright schemes, but in general I only link to resources that are also freely shared. You should of course acknowledge those sources distinctly (sometimes people say “I found this on Chris Corrigan’s website” but what they really found was a link to another source. That’s not fair to the original authors). Formally, it’s a Creative Commons, non-commerical, attribution license. Practically, it means that you can do anything you want with those materials as long as you attribute my original work to me and you don’t sell it. Basically, I ask people to err on the side of sharing. In other words, share first and ask permission later!
How do you share your stuff?
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A colleague emailed today and asked me this question: “which tool do you use when you have to analyse the content of your harvest with groups?”
My answer was that it depends on so much. Which means there is no one rule or tool but rather a principle. The principle would be this: “Participatory process, participatory harvest, simple process, simple harvest” The primary tool I use in complex decision making domains is diversity.
A story. Once, working with the harvest of a a series of 4 world cafes that had about 100 people in each, I ended up with 400 index cards, each containing a single insight which we later transcribed. It would be folly for me to work with a taxonomy of my own design, so I invited eight people to help me make sense of the work. We all read the 18 peages of raw data and noticed what spoke to us. From there we created a conversation that drew forth those insights and organized them into patterns. The final result was a report to the 400 people that had gathered that was rich and diverse and as complex as the group itself without being overly complicated to implement.
So it depends. If you use the Cynefin framework, which I have been studying and using a lot lately, you will see that different domains of action require different harvesting and sense making tools. So be careful, use what is appropriate and try to never have a place where one point of view dominates the meaning making if you are indeed operating the realms of complexity, chaos or disorder..